The Technology section of the Washington Post has an interesting article today reviewing the latest notebook computers from Dell, Apple and other companies. The article concludes about the PowerBook…

The Technology section of the Washington Post has an interesting article today reviewing the latest notebook computers from Dell, Apple and other companies. The article concludes about the PowerBook:

Built-in Bluetooth wireless may not be very useful now but is likely to get more so in the future; WiFi antennas are built in for a simple upgrade to wireless networking. And the addition of DVD recording capability in a laptop at a just-under-$2,000 price is remarkable.Weak: Battery life, at 2 to 3.5 hours, falls short of what other Apple laptops have achieved. The lack of USB 2.0 ports limits your choice of peripherals, and the selection of bundled third-party software is inexplicable — Apple includes Intuit’s QuickBooks business-accounting program but leaves out any sort of word processor or spreadsheet application.

The article also offers the following 5 Tips for Laptop Shopping:
1) Read the fine print about a laptop’s weight. Many manufacturers use a “travel weight” figure that assumes you’re leaving such frills as the removable CD-RW drive at home.
2) Knock an hour off any battery-life estimates. The odds are the lower figure is what you’ll actually see in daily use.
3) Buy more hard disk than you think you need. Hard-drive upgrades are at best expensive, at worst impossible on a laptop, so you’re better off buying more than necessary at the start.
4) Don’t buy a laptop without at least a built-in WiFi antenna, which will greatly simplify adding wireless networking later on.
5) Don’t buy a laptop without either USB 2.0 or FireWire ports on board, and never buy a laptop with only one USB port.